Merry Christmas!

Our Holiday season this year started off with a BANG....literally....when I miscalculated a turn into traffic on my way to take Hallie to dance and totalled Kyle's car. Good bye Altima! You were a great, reliable, comfortable car and you will be missed. Thankfully though the car--and definitely my pride--were all that suffered major injury. I did manage to fracture a bone in the top of my right foot but that was more just amazingly annoying than anything else as I hopped and limped and swore my way through the Holidays. With that happening on December 1st the rest of the month seemed like smooth sailing in comparison.

We continued our 2-tree tradition this year by decorating our "Tai Pan" living (or dying really)tree down in the living room and our fun, eclectic, family ornament, artificial tree up in the loft. Of course we drank all the egg nog we could handle and sang along to Mitch while decorating both trees.

Kyle is really honing his pancake artistry. He made these Santa Clause and Snow Man masterpieces for the kid's breakfast on Christmas Eve.

I've taken Hallie to Ballet Wests The Nutcracker once before but in an act of bravery (insanity?) we brought along Jake, Ryan and Kevin this year. They did great through the first half when there are a lot of dancing kids, animals, and toys to watch but the second half is almost 100% ballet and was torture on everyone involved. We made it though! The real highlight for the boys was watching cliff divers at the Mayan Restaurant at lunch on the way to the theater. It was all downhill from there....for the boys anyway....the rest of us enjoyed it :)

One of our best Christmas presents this year was getting to have Grandma and Grandpa Woody come and spend the holidays with us. We loved all the baking projects, story times, bowling and so many other special memories made having you here. And our kids were introduced to wearing red vests while eating Christmas Eve dinner which they thought was really cool.

. Here they are slaving away in the kitchen...it was really disappointing when they left town and my dishes stopped magically doing themselves.

My parents and Trisha love to make the rounds around Utah County on Christmas morning and watch all the grandkids open their presents. With them there along with the Woodruffs we had quite the full house on Christmas morning! The kids loved having such a large, adoring audience.

In honor of TJ heading off to Boot Camp all of the kids Christmas pj's were camo style. And one of my mom's big presents was this life size cardboard cutout of TJ.....believe it or not that is not actually TJ in the picture ;

Even with all of the ups and downs and overall insanity that is Christmas it was a wonderful month that reminded me how grateful I am for my family and for my Savior.

Random Hiking Collage

While putting together my Mexico pictures the other day I came across this collage of pictures that we made last summer and never posted. We feel like one of our big responsibilities as parents is to brainwash our kids into loving all the same things we do so we try to get up into the mountains as often as we can. This was our first succesful Y Hike since having Isabel. Our first attempt was when she was only 3 weeks old and due to technical difficulties we only made it about 100 yards. Things went a lot more smoothly this time and everyone except Izzie made it up and back down on their own!

Thanksgiving in Cancun!

After a ridiculously long wait....here are some of our pics from our Mexico trip! I was putting it off because I was going to make an Animoto video with them (like I did for Kyle's Ironman video) but they now require you to have an annual membership to make full length videos. RIDICULOUS! Its only $5 a month but I'm not gonna do it!!! So look at the pictures one at a time, get that Jason Mraz/Colby Caillet song Lucky running through your head (or whatever song you're in the mood to listen to) and you'll get the overall effect that I was going for. We had a fantastically fun trip and we still talk about wanting to go back all the time. We got to scuba dive through underground caves (cenotes), swim and swim and swim, shop downtown, drink all the pina coladas and diet coke we could handle, go to Sr. Frogs, and swim some more. We even had a chance to make turkey cookies! And Hallie got to go with Ryan, Nana, Kelli and TJ to Xel-ha, a really cool natural aquarium/water park. We loved it! Thank you thank you thank you Mom and Dad!!!